platform · Microsoft
RAG & Knowledge Retrieval with Azure OpenAI
RAG & Knowledge Retrieval built on Azure OpenAI, chosen where it genuinely fits, and swapped where it does not.
- Category
- platform
- Vendor
- Microsoft
- Alternatives we also use
- 9
Why Azure OpenAI for this
A RAG system that cannot cite its source is a liability. Every answer we ship points back to the page it came from, so a reader can verify in one click.
Azure OpenAI is strongest at enterprise compliance posture and integration with existing Microsoft estates. For rag & knowledge retrieval that matters because the failure modes of this kind of system tend to cluster exactly there.
The honest trade-off: quota management and regional capacity can constrain scaling at short notice. We say that up front because a stack chosen for fashion rather than fit becomes someone's migration project two years later. Every engagement opens with a measurement: the cycle time, the cost per transaction, or the error rate we are being asked to move.
We hand over with runbooks, tests and a team that knows how it works, not a dependency.
The honest assessment
- What it is
- OpenAI models under Azure's compliance envelope and enterprise agreements.
- Strongest at
- enterprise compliance posture and integration with existing Microsoft estates
- Trade-off
- quota management and regional capacity can constrain scaling at short notice
- Category
- platform
We are not a reseller for Microsoft and hold no commission on this choice. Where a different option fits your workload better, the recommendation will say so. That is the entire value of asking us.
What is included
- Ingestion pipeline for your real document formats
- Chunking and embedding strategy tuned to your corpus
- Hybrid keyword plus vector retrieval with reranking
- Citations on every answer, traceable to the source page
- Permission-aware retrieval that respects existing access rules
- Retrieval quality benchmarked against a labelled question set
Questions
RAG or fine-tuning?
RAG for knowledge that changes and must be cited; fine-tuning for style, format and task behaviour. Most production systems use RAG for the facts and light fine-tuning or few-shot prompting for the form.
How accurate will it be?
We build a labelled question set from your domain and report retrieval precision and answer accuracy against it. That number is the deliverable. We do not ship a system whose quality nobody has measured.
Can it respect our existing permissions?
Yes. Retrieval is filtered by the user's actual entitlements, so the assistant can never surface a document the user could not already open.
Alternatives for rag & knowledge retrieval
Same capability, different stack. Each page states its own trade-off.
Building with Azure OpenAI?
Bring us the workload and we will tell you whether this is the right stack for it.
Or email bd@dtrasglobal.com · call +91 74118 77878